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Top 10 Most Interesting Cleantech News Stories from July

published on: CleanTechnica. This is the third monthly report of 10 of the most compelling clean energy and clean technology stories encountered over the last month. Over a thousand articles were reviewed across many energy platforms, including renewables, fuels, energy generation, energy conservation, and climate. Here are my “Top 10” that might have an impact on your business, your life, and the world we live in. Or, at the very least, might surprise you about what’s going on. And, giving credit where due, thanks to Dave Letterman for the Top 10 idea, listed in reverse order. 10. Perhaps a model for industrialized nations, Australia is focused on a 100% renewable energy grid from wind and solar by 2040. Because wind power plants are already cheaper to build than new coal or gas plants — and solar plants soon will be. And, by 2040, most aging Aussie fossil fuel plants will be retired. This is also true in India. 9. Researchers at Wetsus in the Netherlands have publish…

UK Unplugs To Advance Offshore Wind

Pete Danko for Earthtechling It sounds like a contradiction, but to get more power at less cost from offshore wind turbines, the UK is looking to back projects that don’t require a grid connection – and, in some cases, don’t even have turbines. Here’s what’s going on: The Crown Estate, which manages the waters off the UK’s vast coastline, has put out a call for test and demonstration projects that seek to advance offshore wind technology in areas such as “foundations, cable laying and operations and maintenance procedures.” image via London Array Offshore wind power has a wide range of advantages over land-based wind power. People find it less objectionable, the wind is more consistent, the turbines can be made larger … the list goes on. But it’s pricey. Last year, Bloomberg New Energy Finance put the levelized cost of offshore wind at about $212 per megawatt-hour, more than twice that for land-base wind. A U.K. goal is to drive the cost down to £100/MWh by 2020 – about…

Texas Center Eyes Building A Better Wind Farm

Pete Danko for EarthTechling Image: The new SWiFT research facility (image via Texas Tech University) On the wind-swept plain of the Texas panhandle, government, academic and industry researchers are now taking on the challenge of making wind power better, with a particular focus on the hugely important question of how turbines arrayed in a group affect each other. “Some estimates show that 10 to 40 percent of wind energy production and revenue is lost due to complex wind plant interaction,” said Jon White, Sandia National Laboratory’s technical lead for the just-commissioned research center at Texas TechUniversity, dubbed SWiFT, for Scaled Wind Farm Technology. Wake energy loss and wake-induced loads are the kinds of thing that can be simulated and studied with sophisticated computer programs. But at SWiFT, reseachers have actually turbines installed in the field, three to start with more possibly to come, to work with. There are also two 60-meter weather tower…

Floating Wind Turbine In Maine A Game Changer

Image: The world’s first full-scale floating wind turbine, Hywind, being assembled in the Åmøy Fjord near Stavanger, Norway in 2009, before deployment in the North Sea. Offshore wind turbines could more than quadruple the United States’ wind energy production, according to the U.S. Department of Energy. Until now, the United States has lagged behind countries like Denmark and the U.K. in installing offshore wind turbines, despite the vastly larger shorelines. That situation will likely change with the recent installation of a floating wind turbine off of the coast of Maine, the first such device in North America. About the floating wind turbine project The U.S. Department of Energy and the University of Maine teamed up to create the first North American floating wind turbine, situated just off the coast of Castine, in south-central Maine. Maine is particularly well-suited for generating wind energy because of the prevailing northeasterly winds that blow almost constant…

Renewables Continue to Outpace Conservative Global Projections

by Stephen Lacey, Greentechmedia The International Energy Agency is out with its latest medium-term outlook for global renewables. And once again, projections for installation and energy production have been revised upward. According to the IEA's analysis, renewable electricity will surpass output from natural gas and double generation from nuclear by 2016, becoming the second-most important source of electricity behind coal. Those projections for generation are 90 terawatt-hours higher than last year's medium-term renewable energy market report. The IEA now says that renewable electricity will make up one quarter of gross power generation in 2018, with non-hydro renewables accounting for 8 percent by that date. Although the IEA has always been outspoken about the need to deploy more low-carbon technologies and address climate change, the organization has been known for its conservative analysis about the future growth of renewables. For example, in 2003, it …